Wreckoning Reckoning

Posted on Tue Sep 22nd, 2015 @ 11:31pm by Lieutenant Yzhara & Lieutenant Commander Le Austin & Master Warrant Officer Vestara Stronghold & Cadet Senior Grade Errowyn St. Cloud & Enlisted Cadet Jasmine [P: Steiner] & Cadet Senior Grade Tim Sutherland
Edited on on Mon Oct 5th, 2015 @ 11:36pm

Mission: The Wainwright's Cadets
Location: Training Deck - USS Wainwright

All was quiet aboard USS Wainwright. Temporarily disabled, the ship floated in the depths of space. Training officers had lowered the proverbial boom on the disaster training exercise. Cadets now stood at attention in a line while furious officers debriefed them about this new outcome in the annals of Starfleet training history.

Lieutenant Yzhara paced up and down the row of cadets that had made up the training crew's senior staff. With Lt. Le busy trying to repair the damage, and Commander Gunning trying to get in touch with the station, she was given the job of addressing the cadets. Her bone white antennae twitched in front of each of the cadets as she seemed to stare straight through them, a trait that Commander Gunning felt would help her with this duty.

Cadet SG St.Cloud stood at attention in front of the assembled Cadet as she was the Acting Captain of this exercise. She couldn't help but feel proud and whomever threw the monkey wrench into this cruise had her deepest respect. This is the type of crew that you would want at your side when the crap hit the fan and watching your back, even if they stole your last power cell for the weapons. As the Fleet Officers tirade continued, the more her smile grew and her posture straightened. Her chin lifted up in pride to have such hell rained down upon herself and crew of cadets.

While other junior officers grilled the cadets about what had happened, Yzhara stayed silent. She finally decided that she had enough, and suddenly raised her voice. "Enough. We're not going to get anywhere just by yelling at them." The ensigns trying to make sense of the incident backed off, and let the aenar take charge. She stopped in front of Cadet St. Cloud, her head tilted at a slight angle as she stared deeply into the cadet's eyes. Well, she stared in their general direction, but her pale glossy eyes seemed to look past the cadet. "Ms. St. Cloud. You were in charge of the mission, were you not. What happened?"

Even though the ship was dead in space and easy pickings. But, damn, it felt good for some odd reason. When she was called upon to explain, she simply spoke. "I make no excuses, but whomever done this will, I am positive, will set things straight. Even if I have to lead them around by the leash and a Klingon Stun Stick! Sirs!" Pausing to take a breath then bravely continued, "I'm sure you Officers have some means to get help? Or we as the whole ship on our own?" She had the audacity to look at the most Senior of the Instructor and the Official Captain. "Will I continue as Captain or you taking over?"

"We'll deal with that soon enough," Yzhara replied. "Help should be on the way, but it remains to be seen if you will be left in command. From what we can tell, on your watch, either by your order or through neglect, one of your officers disabled the ship's power grid in an effort to restore power. Had this not been a training exercise, you may have just stranded your crew in deep space."

Cadet Jasmine was only now grasping the full scope of what had happened. There had been no real attack on the ship. It was all an unannounced training exercise. She closed her eyes, and whispered to herself, "And I crippled the ship." Even though images of Klingon stun prods had just been dropped into her thoughts, Jazz's concerns were elsewhere, "How am I going to explain this to Corrie?" The Shokirian braced herself and spoke loudly at attention, "Captain, I am the one who caused all this."

Yzhara's antenna pointed away from St. Cloud and down the line towards the cadet who just spoke up. The rest of her turned to face her, and the lieutenant strolled down the line to the Shokirian. "Ah, Enlisted Cadet Jasmine. You were working with engineering, were you not?" Yzhara asked, her milky eyes giving her the same treatment as St. Cloud. "Please, cadet, enlighten us. What ever gave you the idea that overloading the power grid would restore main power? I'm no engineer, but last time I checked that seemed a bit counterproductive."

Jasmine sighed lowering her eyes, "Ma'am, symptoms indicated that we were under cyber attack. Every solution which should have succeeded, didn't. The only logical answer that I could think of was to sever automated control of ship's systems. The only quick way to accomplish that was to short circuit the network nodes. I... didn't realize that the cyber manipulations originated from trainers and not hostiles... ma'am."

Vestara entered from the open door, with main power out not all normal things like doors were functioning, she had been in engineering helping to get the ship operational again. She did catch the last sentence and although there were no other ships in the area Vestara knew, but did the Cadet's check or could they check? She wondered. "Lieutenant, secondary systems should be coming online momentarily but we are still working on replacing blown conduits from the overload."

Yzhara turned to acknowledge the boatswain. "Thank you, Bosun. That's good to know. And forgive me for intruding on your thoughts, but you made a good point." The white skinned andorian turned back to the cadets. "Did any of you try to signal for help before acting, or did you just start blowing things up and hope for the best? I'll give you some credit for creative thinking, Cadet. You assessed the situation and made a judgement call based on the evidence, which is good. But that judgement call, which was made without conferring with your commanding officer, left the ship more damaged afterwards than it was before you acted."

"I'm sure one of the Bridge crew made the efforts. I did leave Cadet Sutherland in charge on the bridge, while I tried to make an effort to meet up with the Engineering crew. But unfortunately...." Cadet St. Cloud finally showed meekness, "I get easily disorientated in total darkness." Her voice softened.

Yzhara nodded. Navigating in total darkness was something that most humanoids struggled with, although it wasn't much of an issue for her people. The lieutenant looked back in the general direction of Vestara. "Bosun, have you ever heard of repairing a power failure, one due to sabotage or otherwise, by overloading the power grid?"

Jasmine sighed contritely, "Please, automatics had to be knocked out first. That would include power controls. After that was accomplished, power would then be restored via manual overrides."

"And if it was a real attack, you just left the ship exposed and defenseless." Yzhara shook her head. "I understand that you felt like you were saving the ship, and some situations require a split second decision. But some situations require more assessment before you attempt percussive maintenance."

"Not a typical one, that's for sure but has been talked about," Vestara replied to Yzhara in the quick gap in conversation.

Errowyn felt sorry for Jasmine taking the brunt of the blame for her action. Wishing she could do something to ease the poor girl's misery.

"Pulling the isolinear chips would have also stopped a cyber attack," Le Austin said as he walked out of engineering where he'd been assisting repairs. "As would cutting external communications to the computer core, and then failing over to the secondary core," Austin explained. He sighed and gave the cadet a sorry smile, "Look, you made a quick call, but it wasn't the best one. Maybe it was effective in stopping the initial issue, but it wasn't good for the next step in the line. When you're in charge of a ship, you have to be one step ahead." Austin explained.

"Oh, and you happen to know what we were up against, how?" Tim Sutherland bit.

"I do. I programmed it, and I was observing the entire time," Austin answered, arching an eyebrow. "It was a deep cluster virus hissing in the binary system files. Ops could have found it with a basic scan, and it could have been circumvented via any of the methods I suggested above."

"Oh..." Tim said, sinking back.

"That being said," Austin continued, turning back to Jasmine, "The problem was correctly identified, and a viable solution was had... just... not the best solution. I'd say that's a pretty good job for a crew entirely of cadets with no senior leadership," Austin offered, smiling at Yzhara. "Right?"

"Lieutenant Le makes a good point," Yzhara conceded. "But as I said, you still must learn to evaluate all of your options before acting. Taking the first solution that comes to mind is not always the best option."

The life support technician sighed through weary eyes, "I'm sorry, I didn't know about the vital engineering chips. I was afraid to ask for help doing it because a cyber enemy would have overheard and stopped me. I guess that I need tactical training which addresses ship takeovers."

"Sometimes we have to ask for help, Cadet," Yzhara rebuked. "Not everyone knows everything. Nor are you expected to know everything. That is why we have specialties. If we expected our officers to know everything, we wouldn't need so many people on the crew, now would we. The situation ended badly, but it could have been much worse. The most important thing is that we do turn this into a learning experience."

The bewildered Shokirian returned nods, "Aye, Ma'am."

Errowyn looked at Jasmine, breaking protocol, "Don't feel bad. If I was on Ops. I'd requested the same thing done. The system still had to be shut down to contain the virus. And rebooting of the ship systems to clear out the virus." She gave Jasmine thumbs up. "You can be my Engineer anytime, Crewmate Jasmine." Giving the girl a smile.

Jasmine returned a subdued bow of her head in gratitude.

"Hopefully we all learned a valuable lesson from all of this. I know I did," Yzhara muttered, looking vaguely in Le's direction. "Don't forget that you will all still owe your instructors a self assessment when we get back to the station. But for now, let's get this ship moving again. Dismissed."

---

Lieutenant Yzhara
Chief Flight Control Officer, USS Montreal

Lieutenant Le Austin
Chief Engineer, Starbase 332

MWO Vestara Stronghold
Boatswain, Starbase 332

CSG Errowyn St. Cloud [P: Akiashiro]

CSG Tim Sutherland [P: Le]

EC Jasmine [P: Steiner]